Lax or Lazy?

This is another dawn photo.  I can't resist them, for their beauty, for the metaphoric awareness of another day, sometims with a golden sun.  My windows face east. I am an early riser so all winter I see the dawn. And often I am enchanted by the colors, the cloud formations so I take a photo.  Then I sit own and have breakfast. Twenty minutes later when I sit here at the computer, still facing the dawn, I have to pull the curtain because it's so bright I can only see dawn-light, not the computer  screen. I watch as the sun rises a little more to the north now and will take note as it moves to be directly in front of me in another two months when the spring equinox arrives. This very simply appreciation of nature is a habit. I write poems about it sometimes.

Now we are in another year; I have ignored the blog for half a year.  Lax or lazy or just not inspired? Some of all of the above. Now I have moved from Big 7-0 to Big 8-0. This numeral, a standing eternity sign, I recognize, but am surprised. I never thought about becoming 80; somehow it seems particularly weighty. And yet I don't feel any older than I did during all the 70s. Okay, I am a little stiiffer, it's harder to get up from my low 50's style sofa. But that's because I have not been walking as much (NOT in the winter, although there's an indoor track I keep promising myself I will use daily).

I have just had a pace maker sewn into my clavical area. That was a bit of a surprise but it was not really a difficulty or big deal.  I have been aware for a long time that I have outlives other members of my family  except for Old Uncle Joe who was a quiet curmudgeon who lived alone many years after wife, Emma died.  He had the company of dogs and made occasional trips into the  Kentucky town near-by.  He spent much of his time making little cedar boxes which were never well sanded and never  painted or quite finished. And finally, when he seemed to be going downhill with nothing but hotdogs in the refrigerator, his sisters-in-law (by then both widows) packed him up and punked him down at his one nephew's home (my brother) where he did remain long. By then he was pushing 90, crochety beyond anything his hostess could cope with so he was put in a nursing home.

I barely knew Uncle Joe. We visited a few times a year -- it was most of an hour's drive to Dry Ridge,  Kentucky in those days before the bridges over the Ohio River and the improved roads. I always knew the story (myth, truth, whatever) that he had been born prematurely at four pounds and spent the first few months with a dresser drawer for a crib. But he was the first of seven sons.  My father the second, two others who lives to maturity and three who died very young. But ours was not a family that told family stories.  That is all I know. And I am not one to dig into it further. But the paternal side of the family was not the one with heart disease. That was the material side and I'm dong well with modern medicine and surgery and such.  Perhaps I will write more about this subject tomorrow, or next week.  Right now I have to be somewhere soon.  It won't be six months before I come back.